Over a decade ago internet providers made the bold move of taking internet access “off the clock” by eliminating time restrictions on their service. This along with the ever-evolving connections made the internet the ideal canvas for creative development. Suddenly the average person was able to generate content that would reach a vast amount of people. This development paved the way for many entrepreneurs. Life on the internet was good, content was free-flowing, accessible, and very cheap to generate.

Today

As of June 7, 2010 AT&T introduced two new data plans (and so did many other providers) they said would encourage many users to get a smartphone because they were “inexpensive”. While doing this however they discontinued their unlimited data plan forcing new users to pick between a 200 MB plan or a 2 GB plan. Those who wished to keep their unlimited plan could do so as long as they kept their plan (or AT&T allows them to). Though a large percent of data users do not normally go over the 2 GB allowance, the limitation will start to make them think twice before watching a video on youtube, downloading a new app, or watching a streaming movie. And in today’s ever-evolving world of mobile devices data transfer will play a larger, more important role as new applications and features are developed.

Tomorrow

In the long run the limitations set on users via data caps will hinder the development of the internet and of mobile devices. Users, as I said before will have to think twice about doing anything on their phone that will require a hefty amount of data usage. As time passes, the restriction will offset more and more users to using a wifi connection instead, if enough of this happens there is a possibility ISPs will raise their prices or cap users. And hey, they have already started! Just check out Gizmodo’s article. Agh!

So where do you stand? Do you think these new and “affordable” plans are good? How much data do you normally use? I seem to be using about 3-4 GB on monthly on my iPhone.

Before you go on. I will advise you that in order to make the most use of Twitter it is my opinion that it is best to access it via a smartphone. Portability and accessability are key. You will make best of use of Twitter when you have quick access to it and not as much when you have to rush to a computer. Of course a few minutes a few times a day to read a couple of tweets will help too. I find that a lot of the people that use the website are new to the service and usually wind up dropping it because they don’t access it as often and therefore do not get the most they could out of if.

Breaking News

While you indeed have those people that tweet their every move, Twitter can have an actual use in our everyday lives. A real case scenario is, and has been seen used by all of us, the use of Twitter during catastrophes. We’ve all seen CNN, FOX, and the other networks start reading tweets during this important time. The reason is mainly because Twitter can resonate the voice of the people in the disposition in real-time. Way ahead of any news crew. And it is my opinion that the view of someone living it holds way more value than that of someone who’s job is to intrigue you with sensationalism to get good ratings. So while it is a good idea to follow your favorite local news network on Twitter for the latest headlines and links to stories, it is possibly a good idea, to save a search on your Twitter account for the words “earthquake in”, “tsunami in”, or “tsunami in”, as well as keeping an eye on the Twitter trends for anything intriguing. This way surely when you hear someone say something in the office about an earthquake somewhere you can tune to Twitter for info, reactions and links to the story often way faster than doing a Google search.

Following Your Career

Another great way to use Twitter is to follow people whom are important or iconic in your career. For example if you are a designer you might follow a designer you might consider inspiring or interesting or even follow a website that showcases a great artist’s work every day. There are so many possibilities.

So what if you aren’t sure of what person to follow? Well on Twitter there are also Lists of people to follow which are created by users. All it is is a group of people with something in common. It could be Artists, Bloggers, Activists etc. Like following a user you may follow one of these lists if you find one that suits your needs. So how do you find a list to follow? Listorious is just one of a few which can help you find the right list. Also to learn more about lists visit this article on Mashable.

Two more things to keep in mind to help you keep your sanity is that it is okay to not read all the new tweets from the people you follow. Also don’t feel forced to Tweet your every move, doing so might also make you lose interest. Keep yourself informed, keep yourself together.

Today I went out to quench my curiosity by seeing exactly what Google Island a.k.a City Island looks like. It was beautiful! So take this post as my personal nomination to bring Google Fiber to Sarasota. And please keep in mind: I don’t even live there! I think it’d be the perfect complement. Also I would like to point out that this is a section of City Island. I am sure the sections I was not able to visit is just as great.

So here are some pictures (pardon my shoddy image resizing) of what I saw so that you could experience it just a bit. I had a small video as well. Unfortunately I incurred an error during it’s upload from my phone and it was gone. Sad moment. Bad, bad technology!

A couple of weeks ago Google launched one of its greatest products thus far: Google Buzz. People like myself praised Google for the introduction of this social medium while others criticized it. Those who criticized it had a very good reason to: the Gmail user’s contacts email addresses were being published on their Google public profiles. This was probably due to the fact that Google developers had tested Buzz between themselves during its development in a corporate environment and thus saw no need for privacy. Though kind of understandable it still does not let Google off the hook in my and many other people’s eyes. Privacy is something all of us hold dear, and though it is hard to be private on the internet we certainly want to separate what our friends can see versus what our co-workers, bosses and stalkers can see. This separation was not considered upon Google’s implementation of Buzz. The lack of privacy controls made a lot of people unhappy and brought Google a few steps back in gaining the user’s trust.

About two days later Google made some changes to the Buzz application allowing user to have more control over their privacy. This quick response shows, or at least is interpreted by myself that Google cares about its users and I applaud that.

Looking Forward>>>

So after Google tweaks, buffs, and polishes Buzz what will we have? What do you think? Will it fail? Will it replace Facebook, Twitter and friends? Or will it enable communication between all these websites?

I go for the last one! I think this will push social websites to develop ways to “speak” between each other and will in the end prove to be a breakthrough. Google, you win! Please just try not to compromise your user’s privacy anymore or your users won’t trust you. Like Wallstreet you are also not too big to fail. : )

Woah that was a lonnggggg break from my attempt at blogging. Believe it or not it is tough! Coming up with decent ideas to write about. So many things to write about but then once you start you wonder if you know enough about this subject to not sound like an opinionated babbling idiot. Maybe I was in over my head? Anyway the main reason I made this site was to share some of the code I write for other’s learning purposes. It somehow got warped into this thing about cell phones. I apologize, but hey, it got some hits nonetheless.

So What’s The Plan Now?

Well I want to try to do the world some good. So I am going to create a website that hopefully enables others to so. I can’t talk about it too much right now because I want it to be a bit of a surprise (hopefully a good one). But what I will do is post any issues or cool things I run into on this blog. It will be created using Ruby Rails. It is my first attempt at a real application using the framework so wish me luck. So goodbye until then. See you next post!

1. Make XMLHttpRequest Object

This is the most important thing. It is what AJAX is all about, it is the object that fetches stuff for you to display on your web pages. Without it (and well along with the user having JavaScript enabled) basic AJAX is not possible. I know there are “workarounds” that might give the impression of AJAX but I am just talking about straight-up AJAX. Anyways, the XMLHttpRequest object is important, so it is understandable it must work on every browser. I hope I didn’t lose you. This is how we do it.

var req = null; // XMLHttpRequest Object 

var init = function() {
   try { // firefox, safari, ie7
   req = new XMLHttpRequest(); }catch(e) {
   try { // later ie
   req = new ActiveXObject('MSXML2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e) {
   try { //early ie
   req = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');} catch(e) {
   return false;}}}
   return req;
}

So what did we do here? If you look past all the ‘try’ you notice that we try to declare the ‘req’ object as whatever form of XMLHttpRequest is available depending on your browser. In older versions of Internet Explorer AJAX occurs in the form of ActiveXObjects. This explains most of the clutter in the preceding code.

2. Open The XMLHttpRequest

So you made the object now you need to tell it what to fetch. For this we use the open method of the XMLHttpRequest object which takes three parameters: method (get or post); url, and whether our request is asynchronous or not. What asynchronous means is allowing to happen at different times.

Additionally you have to execute the ‘send’ method of the request object passing a null value. The ‘send’ method ships our request to the server, the value it takes is used for POST requests which is why we pass null this time. This is what it looks like.

req.open('GET', 'index.php?call=Marco', true);
req.send(null);

For simplicity’s sake in our example we are going to use the form’s ‘GET’ method to request text from the server as opposed to XML. Using the form’s ‘POST’ method is a little more difficult and requires additional code. I will later explain how that is done in another post.

Another thing you might want to know is that some browsers might try to cache the response you received from the server. So no matter how different the response you are expecting is, it returns the same one always. To avoid this you might want to try append the time the request was made to your ‘URL’ string as so.

var time = new Date();
req.open('GET', 'index.php?call=Marco&time=' + time.getTime(), true);
req.send(null);

Note

Also please note that AJAX will only work within the server that made the request so make sure the ‘url’ value you pass is a local one. Cross server AJAX requests are not readily possible for security reasons but can be allowed through additional server configuration.

3. Check For The Request’s State Change

Now the next few steps might get a tiny bit complicated. I will try extra hard to simplify them.
First we want to try to monitor the ‘onreadystatechange’ event of the XMLHttpRequest. The ‘onreadystatechange’ event tells us when there is a change of state in our request as the name already suggests. So we are going to listen in by making an event handler for it.

req.onreadystatechange = function() {
     ...
}

However the ‘onreadystatechange’ event handler itself won’t really tell us anything. The reason being that there are four states the request can move around from which won’t necessarily hold the data we want. They are listed below. For our purposes we only care about state #4 which means our data is ready for our viewing.

• Uninitialized (0)
• Loading (1)
• Loaded (2)
• Interactive (3)
• Completed (4)

So in order to check when our state is at 4, we create a simple conditional statement within our event listener.

req.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (req.readyState == 4) {
        ...
    }
}

But again we need more since it is not enough for us to know when AJAX has something to show us. The reason is that it might have encountered an error and we wouldn’t want to show that to the users right? So now we must check to see if everything worked out right and that there were no server errors or anything of the sort. There are two ways to do this. One is to make sure our request’s status (req.status) is greater than or equal to 200 and that it is also less than or equal to 299. Together with the rest of our state change code it would look like this.

req.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (req.readyState == 4) {
        if (req.status >= 200 && req.status <= 299) {
            ...
        }
    }
}

A more simple alternative to the last step we did is to check if the 'statusText' property of our request simply returned 'OK'. For the sake of our Ajax In A Nutshell post name we will stick with the alternative. This is what that looks like.

req.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (req.readyState == 4) {
        if(req.statusText == 'OK') {
            ...
        }
    }
}

Now wasn't that a lot easier?

4. Retrieve Your Data

Finally we grab our much awaited data which will be stored in our request's 'responseText' property. I suggest you structure your main function to accept a handler function for the data. This handler function would then either further process the data and or place it on the HTML document for viewing. In our example we are going to be passing our data to another function (our handler function) which will display it on a div in our HTML document. Below is what the passing of our data to the 'handler' function will look like along with our state change code from before.

req.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (req.readyState == 4) {
        if(req.statusText == 'OK') {
            dataHandler(req.responseText);
        }
    }
}

So there it is. Getting your data from the server wasn't that hard. Hopefully you are not like me and actually get it on the first few reads.

Sample Please?

I have built a sample page and script that uses this code to submit a form to the server. The form will just submit the hidden value "Marco". The server will then respond "Polo" which will be displayed on a DIV below the button.

You can see the sample demo here: http://www.quinterox.com/public/ajax_sample/
You can download the sample files here: ajax_sample (25)

What is SEO?

What is search engine optimization? Often referred to as SEO, it is the act of editing a website to achieve a higher visibility to internet users querying a search engine with keywords. As a result of applying SEO methods to your website the supposed relevance of your site on a search engine’s result page will increase. Some popular search engines people and companies out there try to make are Google, Yahoo, Window’s Live Search
(“Top 10 Search Engines – Top Ten SEs.”).

SEO Requirements

Now you might be asking so what expensive tools do I need to download to optimize my website for search engines. The answer is none, however there are programs out there that claim to be able to optimize your website but they actually work against it because some employ sneaky techniques that might raise a red flag for search engines. If there is one thing you need to have in order help a search engines rush users to your website it is content. Without fresh, useful, content that people want no matter how many methods of SEO you apply, it won’t help a bit. So much for this post sounding like an infomercial, there is no such thing as easy money.

Who Needs SEO

So now that you know what it is we are going to talk about some important uses of SEO. One entity to whom it is very important to is businesses. Businesses have a huge need to find people (or other businesses) who need what goods or services they are selling. This is why it is important to make sure they have a persistent easily-acquirable presence to consumers whether it is on television, the paper, or online (“Importance of Web presence.”).

Consumers also benefit from a business’ websites being search engine optimized. For example: a consumer might be seeking a review for a product online that they are willing to purchase but aren’t quite sure about. They could Google the name of their product followed by the word reviews to which they will be presented with an array of websites that have been search engine optimized in some way describing the content they are seeking. The end result, one company sells a product, another becomes a popular destination for the user, and if all goes well the user buys the phone he/she wanted.

Another type of person that benefits from the popularity SEO methods can bring to a website is bloggers. Bloggers blog for many different reasons some of which could be to gain relationships in on online community, it’s their job, the job they are trying to acquire, their diary, or because it’s a hobby. Whatever the reason their blogging is an attempt to make a web presence for themselves (“5 Reasons To Contribute To A Blog”), which if properly applied SEO will boost their website and in effect their popularity.

How Do We SEO?

So far we have done nothing but talked about what search engine optimization is and who uses it and why but have not talked about how to actually apply these methods. One thing you should know is that there are many different methods the pros suggest you use but this paper will only demonstrate the basic and a couple of advanced methods of SEO. At the end of the paper there will be a list of additional online sources you can visit if you are interested in more.

<HTML lang="fr">

<title>Elk QA3 - messaging phone - Ottowola USA</title>

<meta name="description" content="Ottowola Elk QA3 helps you stay connected with your friends. Features a full keyboard, or turn it upright for your traditional phone capabilities.."/>

In the HTML Body

Use adequate elements for important body content titles.

<h1 >Elk QA3 – My Review</h1>

Use adequate descriptions for links and media.

USE

<a href=”http://mywebsite.com/pictures/ElkQA3a_phone.jpg”>Elk QA3 phone</a>

<img src=”http://mywebsite.com/pictures/ElkQA3a_phone.jpg” alt=”Elk QA3 phone“ title=”Elk QA3 phone“>Elk QA3 phone </img>

DO NOT USE

<a href=”http://mywebsite.com/stuff/picture0001.jpg”>Click Here</a>

<img src=”http://mywebsite.com/stuff/picture0001.jpg”></img>

Don’t share your website’s popularity by posting links without the attribute rel=”nofollow”. Without this the other website will gain some popularity off of yours. It could be problematic specifically if a spammer manages to post links on your site to their causing search engines to consider you to be part of a “bad neighborhood” (“Webmaster guidelines – Webmasters/Site owners Help.”).

ALLOW

<a href=”http://johnswebsite.com/” rel=”nofollow”>John’s Development Website</a>

DO NOT ALLOW

<a href=”http://johnswebsite.com/“>John’s Development Website</a>

Similarly if you find a legit way to get a more important site (for example CNN.COM) to link to you, your page’s rank is more likely to increase since you will get little boost off its popularity.

If you have Javascript menus, make sure you have a sitemap or a page that contains all the links on your site. Some robots do not operate with Javascript therefore being blind to these links. Below is an example.

JavaScript Dropdown

Another way around this problem is to include a <noscript> tag within your menu layout which will only be visible only to users without Javascript i.e. Robots.

Avoid html frames. Users can be sent to the incorrect frame and spiders might not be able to easily find the intended content. Also it makes a web page hard to bookmark.

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/
Sitemap: http://www.mywebsite.com/Sitemap.xml

http://johnswebsite.com/categories/programs/photo_editor/

http://johnswebsite.com/index.asp?cat=12&subcat=5&prog=25

My Conclusions

There are many more techniques to optimize your website than the ones illustrated on this document. As stated earlier, it is important to keep new, fresh, useful content flowing into your website, as search engine index’s update every day. It is also beneficial to the blogger/website owners to socialize with others with similar websites and build a reputation so that links could be traded and popularity could be shared. Of course it is always important to make sure that the other sites do not participate in spamming which could hurt your page rank. To summarize, search engine optimization works best with the proper application of three different things: content, adequate page construction, and social exposure.

Gmail

So though we all love Google and thank the internet gods it exists, some us of can’t help but to be annoyed by some of the minute details that bother some of us about its features.

During my testing while trying to insert some HTML into an email message I noticed the Gmail application did not allow you to dive into the message’s HTML to tweak the layout to your liking. Instead I found myself trying to reconstruct the layout I had made on my HTML editor with Gmail’s WYSIWYG editor. I huffed and puffed as I moved at a snail’s pace. After a few minutes I gave up. There had to be a better way!

Copy & Paste

After a little research online I came across a website that had some comments that helped with my newsletter dilemma. About.com had a comment reply left by Nostalgia which suggested the user opens the web page they are trying to email in the web browser, select all, copy, and paste it onto a new rich text Gmail message. This works but leaves CSS class definitions out due to the lack of  the HTML head tag (and CSS links). It does however seem to like any in-line CSS code.  Though this is not the ideal form of coding HTML, it does work making it a pretty basic way to create your newsletter. Just keep in mind Gmail’s limitations on how many people you could send an email to (currently 500 for the web interface and 100 for client software ) and its limits of how many emails can bounce back before they disable your email.

Another thing to consider is your need for subscriber management. If you have a small group you send your newsletters to Gmail is probably ideal, otherwise you might want to purchase software, or web services that allow you to more effectively manage and send out your newsletter.

Email Programs

Some email programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird allow you to edit the HTML of your email. However like the Gmail web interface the end product seems to ignore (or remove?) any CSS class definitions in the header and external CSS file links. So though this option eliminates the step of copying your newsletter from the browser onto the email it also requires in-line CSS but is also affected by Gmail’s 100 send via client software limitation.

Other Software

In my adventures in educating myself about newsletters I also tried out a free newsletter program called SendBLaster. The program seemed pretty useful and packed with useful features. It had a decent amount of emails  it allowed you to send for free (100 per day), a bounce-back test, a spam-check, an HTML editor, as well as the option to send a text version of your newsletter amongst others .  If you need to send more than one-hundred emails in one day you might want to invest in the Pro version or even a web service such as Mailchimp which has great features at different price levels. Keep in mind however that if you are using SendBlaster or any similar software your email host’s send-limit might still apply even with the program.

What’s yours is yours

What am I refering to? Well a lot of mobile devices nowadays are sold handicapped of their abilities in order for a mobile company to twist your arm into buying their ‘services’, essentially to…make them do what they were intended to. Evil huh? There are a lot of sites out there that teach you how to enable some services on your phones for free. Just google ‘cell phone hacks’ for more info.

My story

I recently switched to Metro PCS from Verizon. The guys at Metro PCS told me I could keep my Verizon phone which was cool since they charged full retail for their not so apealing phones. The down side however, is that my internet and pix text messages wouldn’t work. The main reason I switched to them was because of the unlimited everything plans but the thought of me paying for internet (included in my plan) and not getting internet was going to leave a sour taste in my mouth. So I went online and was determined to find a hack for my Motorola RAZR V3m that would enable me to get the internet I was paying for (!). And I found it, which is the reason for this post: as a reminder to myself and to allow others to use their devices as intended. I have not found the fix for the pix messages yet but I will append that to this post once I do.

Aside:

Though i’m talking a little smack about Metro PCS, i’m not mentioning my previous unhappiness with Verizon’s yearn to charge you for everything your phone can do as a ‘service’. I am disappointed with both in a way, one will happily charge me for something I am not getting, and the other wants to charge me for merely looking at my phone. Eh, I guess that’s business.

Metro PCS WAP Settings for RAZR V3m

* By the way I have noticed this method only works on RAZRs where dial-up networking has been enabled. To know if it is enabled navigate to menu/setting and tools/system/security/data connection. If data connection is not available then dial-up networking is not enabled. To enable it you must then perform a seem edit on the Razr’s operating system, be VERY careful doing that, you could break your phone’s operating system rendering it useless. Do this at your own risk. To learn how to conduct a seem edit visit hacktherazr.com’s guides section. Once you know how to do that, perform the edit on this page called “Enable Dial Up Networking” which is the third one from the top.
Once that is enabled go to menu/setting and tools/system/security/data connection, enter your security code which most likely is 000000, then go to 1XRTT Data and type in the same user id and password I provide in step 2.

1. Open your phone and dial #073887* (#SETUP*) and enter the security code which is normally 000000. Press OK.
2. Select ‘Web Sessions’ then go down to ‘[New Entry]‘ and enter the settings provided below.

   Name: Metro PCS (or whatever you'd like, it doesn't matter)
   Homepage: (leave alone since it won't let you change it)
   User ID: YOUR_10_DIGIT_PHONE_NUMBER@mymetropcs.com
   Password: 00
   Gateway IP 1: (leave as is, normally all zeros)
   Gateway 1: wap.metropcs.com
   Serive Type: http
   Port 1: 3128
   E2E Port 1: 443
   LXL Port 1: 3128
   Gateway IP 2: (leave as is, normally all zeros)
   Gateway 2: (leave blank)
   Service Type 2: http
   Port 2: 0
   E2E Port 2: 0
   LXL Port 2: 0
   Cache Start-Up: On(Store)

   Then click ‘Done’.

3. Once your new settings are saved you are taken back a screen. Here you will see the name of the setting you just created. Select it, then click ‘Options’ and choose ‘Set Default’.
4. Once that is done hit ‘END’ and restart your phone. When it turns on you should be able to go online.

If it does not work or you want to go back to your old connection setting. Repeat step 1, then select ‘Web Sessions’ and right click your old wap setting and set it as your default. You may need to restart your phone.

I recently installed YSlow, a handy web development tool for Firefox. In it there is an option that tells you whether your CSS or JavaScript files are cached on the client’s computer allowing for a quicker page load. I noticed my files were not cached so I looked a little into how to go about caching them so the browser won’t download the same file over and over when going from page to page. So I went about conducting my own tests to see how to make this happen. The only way of making it happen other than setting an expire date/time on the WHOLE page (or on the .htaccess file in Linux servers) was to create a server-side file that would output the expiration, content type headers as well as the actual styles/code in your web application. Below is a clearer picture of how I made it happen.

PHP- Step 1.

Make a dynamically generated CSS file that includes expiration and content headers (code below). Save it as ‘dynamic_css.php’. The actual CSS styling can be typed in the same way you would do in a regular stylesheet, we are only after getting those expiration and content type headers sent out.

<?php
header("Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2020 20:00:00 GMT");
header('Content-type: text/css');
?>
h1 { color: Red; }

PHP- Step 2.

Add ‘dynamic_css.php’ as the CSS href of you document. This should make YSlow happy and increase the speed at which the user navigates through pages that use the same CSS file. Use the same method to add expiration tags to JavaScript.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dynamic_css.php"/>

ASP- Step 1.

The way I added expire tags to my CSS code in ASP is very similar to PHP’s. First you make a server-side CSS file and save it as ‘dynamic_css.aspx’. Since it is important the headers hit the server first we use server-side code  to send those out first. We type in the actual CSS code like we would in a regular CSS file after that. Besides would you really want to Response.Write() all of your CSS code? I think not.

<%
    Response.Expires = 3600
    Response.ContentType = "text/css"
%>
    h1 { color: Blue; }

ASP- Step 2.

Add ‘dynamic_css.aspx’ as the CSS source of you document. This should make YSlow happy since the expiration headers are now being sent increasing the speed at which the user navigates through the pages that share the same CSS file. Use this same header method to add expiration tags to JavaScript files.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dynamic_css.aspx"/>